Books are terribly labour-intensive. My recent one took literally years to write (20 years to "live" and two years to type up), then months more to be edited, copy-edited, designed, printed, bound and finished. It is a journey that began, effectively, in 1988.

So, you can imagine my delight when I opened the newspaper the other day to read that "the death knell will sound for the traditional book in nine days' time".

Oh good. I wondered what that noise was, as I reached for the first shiny copy of my meisterwerk. Of course! It was a party of campanologists tuning up for the death knell.

On 17 October, the Kindle (handheld computer reading-screen book-replacement thing) will go on sale. Marvellous. I am an overnight anachronism, the doggerel performance poet who perfected the last flourish of her open-air routine just as William Caxton heaved over the border with a big box.

Since I don't really understand what the Kindle is, I naturally fear and despise it. I was the same way with the CD player, the DVD and the new people next door. (I say "was", I still am. I particularly hate the neighbours.)

The media's response to this device will, I am sure, be negative. We will hear a lot, over the next few weeks, about the soullessness of reading on screen compared to turning pages. If I promised you a pound for every time you are told by a columnist during the month of October that "you can't read a Kindle in the bath", I would be skint by Christmas.

In the newspapers, on TV arts shows (are there still any TV arts shows?), on Radio 4, around us at social occasions, we will see and hear mournful disquisitions on the beauty of the old-fashioned papery book and what a tragedy it would be if people stopped buying them.

But you know what? Nobody buys books anyway. Nobody. If you have a friend who has written a book, ask how many copies it sold. The answer will probably be 12. Or none. That is unless you happen to be friendly with JK Rowling, Dan Brown or Jordan. Their books fly from the shelves like bottled water in a bird flu scare. Meanwhile, everything else in print is as popular as the Snowdon aviary.

I have whored my book around, don't worry about that. Interviews here, articles there. Since I write for the papers already, do a bit of TV and have written a "true-life confession" with celebrities, gambling, sex and death in it, I probably got about 9,000% more attention than the first-time writer of a serious literary novel. And do you know how many copies have been sold? About a thousand.

There are a thousand people living within five streets of my house. I could have saved two years of sweat by going round to visit them all personally (except the people next door, whom I hate) and telling them: "I was fat and shy, I started playing poker, I lost some weight, won some money, the end."

Yet everyone tells me the book is a tremendous success. A thousand copies already! Meanwhile, the Observer sells nearly half-a-million copies a week and everybody says newspapers are "ailing and cannot survive". By that logic, books are dead, buried, maggot-eaten, mouldering skeletons without even a desperate scratch on the coffin lid from a single twitching finger.

But I understand why you would not buy my book. Do you know what it costs? £16.99. £16.99 for a great heavy clunk of a thing that would take days to read and you probably wouldn't even like. Meanwhile, the Observer is only £2 and has crosswords and Mariella Frostrup in it. It's better than a book for about a hundred reasons.

Are you one of those people who dream of writing their life story? Don't. It is a miserable, lonely, terrifying yet monotonous grind, followed by three seconds of excitement and a vast anti-climax. And then you have to have a party. I read in the paper last week that Simon Cowell's birthday party was "tacky, embarrassing and vulgar". But all parties are tacky, embarrassing and vulgar. You are inviting people along to celebrate something you've done – got older, got married, finished a work project.

"Come along and raise a glass to me!" you are shouting eagerly at the world. "Come and look at my fat successful face! I'll stand in the middle grinning while you all wave and clap!"

Once you are doing something so outrageously tawdry and humiliating, frankly, you might as well pipe your name over the canapes in mashed potato and ask Kate Moss to sing.

In the case of a book launch, all you are celebrating is the draining years you have spent writing something that probably won't be visible in Waterstone's but may one day be sold for sixpence to someone who pops into a charity shop looking for a solution to a wonky table in the cafe next door.

You might get some very nice letters. But that same warm glow could be got from taking gifts to a children's home or spending the winter looking after old neighbours you don't hate. If there are any. Relatively speaking, all publishing is vanity publishing.

Besides, most books are pointless, unoriginal, overpriced and overlong and I can't promise mine isn't one of them. So, hurray for the death of the book and its final replacement by another computer game for people to enjoy. The enormous plus of nobody reading any more books is that nobody will write any more books.

Oh, and by the way: when columnists start moaning that you can't read a Kindle in the bath, ask yourself what kind of books they buy normally. Rubber ones? Drop a proper book in water and it bloody ruins it. Or, depending on your point of view, improves it immeasurably